Bumble — Meet, Date & Network

Zift
Description

What is Bumble — Meet, Date & Network?

Bumble is a dating and local social-matching app designed by the co-founder of Tinder.

Bumble aims to make the use of these services safer for women by structuring online interactions to place women in charge of the connection process.

Only female users can initiate communication with other users, once a match is identified, and matches expire after twenty-four hours. Likewise, a male user contacted in this way has twenty-four hours to respond before the connection is lost. Either party can initiate conversation in a same-sex pairing.

Users log into Bumble via Facebook, in order to use that platform's age and demographic information to both verify identity and better profile users for compatibility. The app pulls photos, educational history, employment data, and other information to build this profile.

The Bumble mobile app is also promoted as a localized social network to make non-sexual friends, but it is unknown what share of users actually use the app this way.

Bumble started offering a paid tier of services in late 2016, known as Bumble Boost. This service offers users three additional features for paid users: a list of users who have 'liked' the subscriber, known as Beeline; Rematch, a twenty-four hour extension on expired matches; and Busy Bee, which enables unlimited twenty-four hour extensions on matches for users who are interested but just haven't gotten around to contacting their matches yet.

The Bumble dating app was immediately popular, with approximately five million initiated contacts between users within the first eight months of its launch. 12.5 million users were using the app by February of 2017.

As of March of 2017, Bumble averaged 800 million matches. It is the second most popular dating and lifestyle app in the Apple App Store.

Is Bumble — Meet, Date & Network safe for my kids?

Bumble is a dating app and is therefore not safe for children. The app does have sections designed for users between the ages of 13 and 17, but it's easy to then match with an adult user claiming to be of a younger age.

As with any other dating app, parents should be aware that while kids may be using them, they are not recommended. Beyond the ability to easily make a profile with an alternate age, promoting location-based matching can be unsafe for children.